| The last few decades have seen rising interest in the study of many physical processes - all of which have in common the feature of their dynamics being activated when a system variable exceeds a threshold. Examples are sandpile models, granular flow, excitable media, fracture or breakdown, neural networks, Barkhausen noise, market models, etc. Many of these systems, though by no means all, exhibit several common features such as non-equilibrium critical behavior, burst-like relaxation, avalanches with power-law statistics, etc.The object of the meeting is to bring together active researchers working on these different systems to achieve an understanding of the general principles underlying threshold activated dynamics which gives rise to the common observed features as well as the crucial differences among the various systems. |